Gay Connecticut Supreme Court justice calls out Clarence Thomas

A gay Connecticut Supreme Court justice suggested that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was being hypocritical in calling for reconsideration of rulings ensuring legal rights for gay people — while not calling for the repeal of a similar ruling that allows Thomas to be married to a white woman.

Andrew McDonald, a senior associate justice on Connecticut’s high court, took a shot at Thomas in a Facebook post after the U.S. Supreme Court justice leveraged a ruling that repealed the constitutional right to abortion to publicly call for the top U.S. court to potentially reverse rulings that bar states from outlawing gay sex and gay marriage.

“Mr. Justice Thomas had much to say today about my loving marriage. Oddly he didn’t have much to say about his ‘Loving’ marriage,” wrote McDonald, who married his husband Charles in 2009 when McDonald was serving in the state legislature.

“Loving” is a reference to “Loving v. Virginia,” the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned a Virginia law barring interracial marriages. It effectively invalidated other such bans nationally.

Thomas, who is Black, lives with his white wife Virginia “Ginni” Thomas in Virginia — a mirror image of the white husband and Black wife who were the plaintiffs in “Loving.”

The couple in the case, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, had been convicted of violating Virginia’s law and sentenced to a year in jail. The sentence was suspended after they agreed to leave the state and not return for 25 years.

McDonald’s wedding ceremony was conducted by then-Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy. As Connecticut governor four years later, he successfully nominated McDonald to become the second openly gay man to serve on an American state’s Supreme Court.

McDonald married his husband six years before the U.S. Supreme Court in the ruling Obergefell v. Hodges barred states from outlawing same-sex marriages.

Thomas, in his concurring opinion Friday on the decision to overturn the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling, identified three past rulings that he called “demonstrably wrong decisions”: the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell, a 2003 high court case that established the right to have gay sex, and a 1965 case establishing married couples’ right to contraception.

But Thomas did not mention a fourth Supreme Court decision which is based on similar legal grounds to the other three: “Loving v. Virginia.”

“Loving” was decided in part by the Supreme Court…